June 20, 2009

I have longbeen convinced of the soundness of the luck argument against standard accounts of libertarianism (the qualification ‘standard’ is necessary; I believe that libertarianisms that are no more subject to luck than the best compatibilisms are possible, but I don’t want to get into that argument right now). The luck argument, as I understand it, targets moral responsibility: if an agent Xs, where X-ing is bad, and they are lucky to X, inasmuch as had luck played out differently, they would have performed some action incompatible with X (or not action at all), then they are not responsible for X-ing.

The question I am currently grappling with is why are standard libertarianisms subject to an unacceptable degree or kind of luck: that is, what condition or conditions on moral responsibility are not satisfied by an agent who is subject to responsibility-undermining luck? The way in which I set out the luck argument above is influenced by (or perhaps influences) the condition on moral responsibility I am tempted by. Call it the contrastive principle. It is intended as a necessary condition:

An agent is morally responsible for X-ing only if the event of his X-ing is the (non-deviant) upshot of his decision to X rather than Y, where X-ing and Y-ing have conflicting moral valences. An agent can satisfy the contrastive principle either directly – by deciding to X rather than Y – or indirectly; by being strongly disposed on the current occasion to X because of past occasions on which he directly satisfied the contrastive principle.

The above is probably a little obscure, so let me say just a little bit more. Moral valences are polarities; the moral valence of an act is its goodness or badness. Thus, an agent satisfies the contrastive principle directly by choosing a bad action rather than a good one, or vice-versa (actually, I think moral responsibility unlike moral goodness tracks subjective judgments; so really it is by choosing an action that he takes to be bad rather than good that an agent satisfies the principle). I want the contrastive principle to be satisfiable by agents in Frankfurt-style cases (despite my doubts about such cases). The intuitive idea is that we blame agents for choosing the bad rather than the good, and vice-versa for praise.

I have a feeling that the contrastive principle has problems. At the moment, its only a vague feeling. Want to help turn it into a conviction?

June 08, 2009

I'm really excited to present Mark Balaguer's paper, The Metaphysical Irrelevance of the Compatibilism Debate (and, More Generally, of Conceptual Analysis) for your edification. I contacted Mark and asked if we could use the paper as the focus of a reading group as soon as I'd read it, because I thought it deserved the widest possible audience and because it is so provocative. Here it is, with the kind permission of the Southern Journal of Philosophy.

I've closed comments on this post, because I want the discussion to take place in the comments thread of a single post. That post will go up in a few days time, and will contain my commentary on Mark's paper together with his reply.

February 16, 2009

Non-historicists about responsibility (eg. Frankfurt, McKenna) argue that how an agent came to be the way they are is not relevant to whether they are responsible for how they now behave: even manipulated agents (not to mention instant agents) can be responsible, so long as they satisfy some current time-slice conditions (CTS conditions). So, for instance, Mele’s manipulated Beth, who is a dedicated philosopher only because her dean hired neuroscientists to rewire her preferences to make her a psychological duplicate of Ann, can be responsible for the very first act she performs upon waking from the manipulation, even if that is an act she performs only because she has been rewired (perhaps she agrees to referee a paper).

But are they entitled to this view? No one doubts that recent history matters to moral responsibility; even non-historicists concede tracing cases (that is, cases like the drink-driver case, in which someone is morally responsible for hitting a pedestrian while DUI, even though they didn’t control hitting the pedestrian, because they are apparently responsible for their inability to exercise control). But they can apparently point to a relevant difference between these cases and the case of Beth. The principle they uphold, which explains both cases like Beth and the drink-driver, is that all responsibility traces back to free choices by agents who satisfy some set of CTS conditions, regardless of how the agent came to satisfy these conditions.

But recent history matters to moral responsibility in ways beside those seen in tracing cases. Actions are extended processes. Even the shortest take time: it takes time to perceive the stimulus, to begin the reaction and to translate it into overt bodily movements. Now, surely on any view how this history goes matters to whether the agent is responsible for the action. Consider Mog who robs a bank. Mog is responsible in virtue of a complex and extended series of actions: planning the robbery, stealing the getaway car, planting the dynamite... To see this, suppose that some deity creates Mog as an instant agent with lit fuse in hand. I don't think we would hold Mog responsible, even if Mog were to place the dynamite against the wall, in accord with his plan (which he falsely believes himself to have formulated). If you don't buy that, then consider Mog’s twin Meg. Meg is created by the same deity and comes into existence at the very moment she launches a punch aimed at George’s head. She has just time to deflect the trajectory of the punch, were she to desire to do so, but she has no such desire.

Why are agents like Mog and Meg responsible in the real world? In virtue of an extended serious of actions, including actions which are analogues of those like the ownership conditions set down by Fischer, Mele and other historicists. Actions begin as urges or desires; they go on to become overt bodily movements because we fail to inhibit them. That seems at least analogous to the endorsement condition we can find in historicists. So it turns out that history does matter, after all.

Two weeks from now, Kristin Demetriou, a grad student at the University of Colorado (whose - so far unpublished - work Pereboom's 4 case argument is already getting citations) will post her comments on the paper. And then it will be your turn, dear reader.

April 13, 2008

Things have been might quite around the garden for a while. In an attempt to see if can’t stir up a few of the ghosts of threads past, I will engage in my favorite activity: attacking semi-compatibilism, by way of my other favorite activity, mangling science.

The Libet studies, which have caused such a stir, apparently demonstrated that conscious choice lags behind by neural activity by around one third of a second. One of my favorite responses to these studies - Dennett's - argues that the notion we can perform simultaneity judgments as to neural events and volitions depends upon the idea of the Cartesian Theatre, a place in the brain where everything comes together. But while that response looks plausible for a lag of one third of a second, it doesn't look quite so plausible when the gap is an enormous 7 seconds. That's the claim of a new study just published in Nature Neuroscience.

In the study, subjects engaged in a free choice task, choosing between pressing a button with their left or their right hands. The researchers found that they could predict with 60% accuracy which hand they would choose, a full 7 (and up to 10) seconds before the subject reported that the decision was made, by analysing activity in the PFC. The popularpresentations of this study have not failed to draw the conclusion that this study threatens free will.

One comment: I don't see why we shouldn't interpret the PFC activity as representing a disposition and not a choice (though PFC is involved in high level planning).

January 22, 2008

As many of you will know by now, the Philosopher's Annual has apparently been revived. Brian Leiter and Keith DeRose have both opened threads calling for suggestions on the best papers of 2007. Now it's your turn: what were the best papers in free will/moral responsibility/agency in 2007?

October 26, 2007

The journal Neuroethics - of which I am the editor - is now accepting submissions. I define 'neuroethics' very broadly. As well as covering issues in applied ethics arising from interventions into the mind (brain privacy, neuroenhancement, and so on), the journal will also publish work on the ways in which all the sciences of the mind illuminate traditional issues in philosophy. So understood, some of the work of frequent contributors to this blog counts as neuroethics: survey work on causation and harm, on the intuitiveness of compatibilism, and of course work on social psychology and free will.

For more on how broadly I construe neuroethics, have a look at my new book.

October 12, 2007

A paper in Neuron reports that spontaneous fluctuations in neural activity seems to affect intentional action. The activity is pretty low-level - pushing a button at a signal - and the effect of spontaneous fluctuation was small (no effect on reaction time; the effect was limited to the force of the button press). Nevertheless, this might be sufficient by itself to make the difference between success and failure at performing a task.

It is common for philosophers to use examples in which agents succeed or fail at a task due to random neural glitches. This is experimental evidence for the existence of such glitches.

September 22, 2007

Here. An anecdote. A prominent neuroscientist gave a talk I attended about moral responsibility. In question time, I pointed out that compatibilism exists as a view. The prominent neuroscientist said "Oh, I know that philosophers say something like that. But they don't really believe it, do they?"